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I Only Want To See My Friends!
In light of the recent launch of Threads from Meta via Instagram, one of the videos I caught a couple of times was from someone saying they didn’t want to see what’s trending, they didn’t want to discover new users or follow hot topics, they only wanted to see what their friends posted. It got me thinking that would be a rather boring existence.
Stick with me as I explain why.
Let’s assume, and generously so, this person has 300 friends. That’s probably a rather generous number, but if we’re not following trends, discovering new users, or following hot topics, a social butterfly might have 300 friends to follow. On any given day, about 2% of social media users generate content by way of a new post, new comment, or new reshare. So this means out of 300 friends, 6 of them will post something, comment on something, or reshare something. The average user will post slightly less than one post, comment, or reshare per day. To keep the math easy, we’ll stick with once a day. How long would it take to look at 6 new posts each day? Assuming it’s even something we’re interested in seeing, 6 new posts might take 3 minutes to look through.
So you mean to tell me you’d be happy to look at a social media feed only containing posts from your friends, for 3 minutes a day? Maybe it’s me, but I would find it quite boring. I use social media not just to see…
